[ksajadi]

This is the same country that couldn’t introduce driver’s licences with pictures for privacy and surveillance for years. What happened?

[arresin]

Increased paranoia among the rulers because of their guilty conscience.

[SlowTao]

Pretty much. The more they fear the blowback of the actions of civilisation, the more this in power try to hold any semblance of normality in place by force.

[arrowsmith]

Decades of neoliberalism and mass immigration (but I repeat myself) dissolved all the ties — family, community, faith, national identity — that once bound us together. Now there's no social solidarity or cohesion and no-one trusts each other, so they turn to the all-powerful state as the only thing left that can maintain order.

Neoliberalism's end game.